Chương 124: 114. Kaïki

The strait was never closed by walls. It was closed by the men who kept the boats, and they asked their price in the coin of the day, grain then silver then silence. The water asked its own price after, and no one haggled the water. — Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 6th Century BCE, Euxine shore Arthur held the strip of dark leather up to the morning light and bent it between his fingers, testing the grain as he would test a gasket.

The wolf-leather gave without tearing and snapped back without creasing. It was thinner than he had expected, worked down to a weight that was closer to heavy canvas than to hide, and the deep violet tint ran through the full thickness of the grain rather than sitting on the surface. He turned it over. The stitching along the edge was tight and clean, the thread pulled flat into the leather, and the seam line ran dead straight for twenty centimetres without a single wobble.

"That will not fit you," Maria said from behind the Singer, her foot working the treadle in a rhythm she had not interrupted to look up. The child in the basket at her feet was chewing a fist and watching the needle rise and fall with the attention of someone who had not yet learned to be bored.

"I made it wide," Maria said with a smile.

"Now I make it wider."

"I know," Arthur said, putting the sample down on the bench. Maria had already measured him twice in the last few days and declared both times that he had a strange shape. She was not wrong. His shoulders had been a fitting problem since he was seventeen, and whatever the System had done to his frame at thirty-four points of Strength had not improved matters.

He was built for carrying load, not tailoring, and the wolf-leather vest Maria was cutting for him would need to accommodate a torso that belonged on a different species.

"He grows on you," Sarah said from the bench beside her, and squeezed her sister-in-law's arm.

"You could stop a knife with this," Arthur said, picking up the piece of leather again.

"A small knife," Maria said. She took the sample back from him and set it against a paper pattern pinned to the board, checking a line only she could see.

"The big animals, the leather is best. The little ones, I use for the pockets and the wraps."

"These are good, Maria. These are really good," Sarah said. Donna picked up a rectangular offcut from the pile beside the sewing machine and held it flat against her ribs.

"How thick will the chest panels be?"

"Two layers across the front and back. One on the arms," Maria said.

"The front and back panels hold the iron plates in the pockets. Arms stay light or you cannot swing."

"This would make better armour than anything we've had so far, once we bind a decent core to it," Steve said, holding a strip of the offcut leather Maria used for the wraps.

"For which we need more of the decent ones. I hope the Baron chokes on his," Donna said from the doorway.

"I will pay him a visit once this whole test business is done."

"And I'll join you," Arthur said.

"But right now we have more important things on our plate than a revenge fantasy."

"Petros," Sarah said. • • They found him at the slip below the yard with his sleeves shoved up and both arms inside the guts of a winch, swearing at it in a low, companionable stream that did not affect the outcome too much. He heard them coming but did not stop working.

"Ela," he said, looking up.

"You have the look of people who want something. I know this look. It comes to the door with a smile and it leaves with my rope."

"We don't need to borrow your rope," Arthur said with a smile.

"But we need to get to an island."

"What about your last trick?" Petros pulled his arms free, wiped them on a rag that made them no cleaner.

"Pull a boat and row, ne?" He smiled at Sarah.

"And tell Mama, you are going for a picnic."

"It's not as near as Salamis," Sarah said with a frustrated sigh.

"Further out. Across the gulf."

"Then you want Spyros," Petros said after looking at Sarah for a long while.

"I told you this. The first night, at my mother's table, I said it. If you want a boat, you come to me first, before you go to Spyros. Not the other way." He nodded, pleased with his own foresight.

"You came to me first. Good. This saves you money, which he will take anyway, but less."

"You keep his rigging," Donna said.

"I keep his rigging. He keeps me in fish. So he owes me a small kindness, and a small kindness from Spyros is like squeezing oil from a stone you already squeezed." Petros reached for his jacket off the winch housing.

"Come. He is at the next harbour. We walk, it is nothing, and on the way you can tell me what is really across that water, or not, I do not mind either, I have my own eggs to sit on." They went up out of the yard and along the coast road, the sea flat and pale on their right, the morning already hot on the stone.

"Re, Sarah, how is the cover going? You and Arthur?" Petros asked.

"Not again, Petros," Sarah sighed.

"I was telling Maria, what helps the cover is if we call neighbours to the house, to meet you," Petros continued, ignoring Sarah.

"A good party to introduce the couple, ne? Strong cover, whole Athens will know about it."

"I'm sure Maria asked you to shut up, and I'm doing that as well," Sarah said pointedly. • • The walk from the boatyard to the next harbour over was twenty minutes along a waterfront road. Arthur kept the pace measured, reading the ground out of habit. Cracked asphalt, weeds through the expansion joints, the long shadow of a gantry crane that would never lift another container.

Two women were sorting dried fish on a stone step, working in silence, and a man sat on an upturned hull sharpening a gaff hook on a whetstone. He looked up as they passed, waved at Petros and went back to the sharpening.

"That crane hasn't moved in two months. The hydraulic seals will have gone by now," Arthur said, motioning at the crane.

"Even the cable drums will be corroded. Everything on this waterfront that ran on electricity is going to be scrap inside a year. But good scrap." This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"Sooner," Petros said.

"The good metal, the Council is already pulling. They send men with carts." He waved a hand at the road behind them, toward the high ground to the north.

"Up to the old rock. Stone, timber, iron, the roofing tin. Everything."

"Which old rock," Donna said from the rear.

"The Acropolis." Petros shrugged.

"Where else, re? They are pulling the whole coast up that hill. Stone, timber, men who used to mend nets. My neighbour, they took his good handcart and gave him a paper. A paper." He laughed, shaking his head.

"They are making the top of the city into a fort, like in old days. Everyone grumbles, you can't even find a nail easily anymore."

"Well, that makes sense," Steve said, nodding.

"If you had to create a fortified structure, the Acropolis is the obvious choice. It has been since the Mycenaeans fortified it in the 13th century BC." Petros shrugged and kept walking.

"Council plays council games. Not our problem, ne." Arthur filed the information and kept walking. A council pulling men and materials to high ground was the oldest move in the book. In a city that had been losing people to wolves in the streets, it was the obvious one.

"Ela," Petros said, and turned them off the road toward a stone quay that jutted out over the water.

"Spyros is here." • • Petros led them to a broad-beamed caïque with a high curved prow, painted blue and white in the old way. The timber was honest and cared for. The caulking in the seams looked sound. The whole vessel had the battered competence of something that had worked for thirty years and expected to work for thirty more.

A man in his late sixties was crouched on its foredeck with a palm-guard on one hand and a needle the length of a finger in the other, sewing a torn edge of canvas with the unhurried certainty of someone who had made ten thousand of exactly that same stitch. He watched them come the length of the quay without stopping his hands.

"Petro," the man said, when they were close enough.

"You bring me tourists."

"I bring you customers, Spyro," Petros said, stepping down onto the deck as though he owned a share of it.

"These are friends. The ones from the container yard, ne. The ones the whole coast is talking about."

"The wolf-lifter," Spyros said, his eyes landing on Arthur.

"I didn't lift anything," Arthur said.

"Kala. No, no lifting," Spyros said in a tone that implied that he did not believe him but did not want to argue about it either.

"Sit. Not on the nets. Where do you want to go, that you bring Petros to soften me first." None of them sat down at his invitation.

"Across the gulf," Arthur said.

"To Aegina." Spyros looked at him for the first time with something that was not yet interest but was no longer indifference.

"You know how far Aegina is."

"Twenty-seven kilometres from the nearest point of departure," Steve said.

"Roughly fifteen nautical miles. A beam reach in moderate wind would take three to four hours. The Saronic Gulf has been one of the most consistently sailed bodies of water in the eastern Mediterranean for approximately three thousand years. The Athenians ran the grain route through here before they ran it anywhere else." Spyros looked at Steve for a long moment, then looked at Petros.

"Does the Englishman sail, Petro?"

"He reads," Petros said. Spyros gave a short nod as if he expected this.

"Three thousand years, the man says. Maybe so. But the grain ships had twelve men at the oars and a squadron behind them." He tapped the hull with his knuckle.

"This is one boat and one old man. A different calculation." Steve crouched by the gunwale and ran his hand along the inside of the hull where the ribs curved up.

"This is a beautiful boat. Larnaca build? The sweep on the frames, how she carries her beam aft. You don't see the old carvel work anymore, everyone moved to marine ply in the seventies and the ply rots in ten years and this has been in the water since, what, your father's time?" Spyros looked at him for a long moment.

"You read this in a book," he said.

"I read a lot of books."

"I have caulked this boat with my own hands since I was ten years old. My father before me, his father before him." The old man's face had softened by a degree, the small grudging warmth of a craftsman who has been recognised by an outsider.

"But you are not wrong about the frames. Kala. You have fair eyes. Now. Aegina."

"We would pay," Arthur said.

"For cores, I take people all around the near water. To Salamina, along the coast, to the little islands close in where a family is stranded and wants to see a face." Spyros lifted one shoulder.

"Aegina is not the near water. Aegina is across. We do not fish that far anymore. Nobody does."

"Why not?" Spyros held a hand out toward the horizon.

"Before, a man has a problem out there, he picks up the radio. Coast guard comes. Now?" He made the upward chin-jerk and the tongue-click.

"No radio. No coast guard. Nothing. The wind changes, something comes up from below, you are on your own."

"I will tell you how it is. The price to cross, if I crossed, would be five stones. Good ones, not the little dead ones." He held up five thick fingers for emphasis.

"Five."

"Re, Spyro." Petros came up off the deck rail, his face showing the perfect outrage of a man seeing a robbery in progress.

"Does the donkey fly? Five stones for one morning of your ugly boat. Three."

"Four stones," Spyros replied to Petros, smiling, "or the donkey stays on the ground and you all walk to Aegina, my friend, which I would pay to watch." He turned back to Arthur.

"But it does not matter what the price is. Four, or ten, or your shield. I will not take you across without the Council's word. Not to Aegina. Not that far."

"Why would we need the Council's permission to hire a boat," Donna said. Spyros came down from the boat and looked at the four of them.

"The Council closed the far water, second month. I have had this berth forty years. I keep it because I do not make problems for the Council."

"So it is the berth," Donna said.

"It is everything." Spyros tapped the quay wall with his knuckle.

"The berth, the harbour, the right to fish. A man who crosses the Council does not lose a trip. He loses his living." Arthur stood on the quay and felt the transaction morph into something considerably larger. They needed a boat. The boat needed a captain who would not sail without the Council's approval. The Council was the same Council currently pulling stone and iron and men up to a fortified hilltop, and walking up to them to ask for a favour meant putting their names on a piece of paper somewhere.

He looked across at Donna, who had her arms folded and her jaw set, staring at the water with a sour expression.

"We have been on the ground for weeks," she said, low enough that Spyros could not hear.

"No Council contact. No official paper. No name on any register. And now we walk up the hill and introduce ourselves."

"Re, Spyros," Petros said, looking over his shoulder.

"If I get the permission, you will take these four?"

"If the permission is for these four," Spyros said, understanding the meaning behind the question.

"If council men see four people on a boat that has permission for one, ne, too risky."

"We've spent this whole time staying off the Council's books," Donna said.

"The container yard put us on it anyway. Now we go and ask them to write our names down ourselves. There would be other captains, who might take the risk for a higher price."

"No captain will go against the Council," Sarah said.

"Not unless we can offer substantially more. Think ten guardian cores. Offer they can't refuse, that sort of thing."

"Well, Donna, unless you would rather row twenty-seven kilometres of open sea in the dark in a stolen dinghy," Steve said, "I think the hill is the option that leaves us alive."

"I do not like it."

"I knew," Petros said, not helping.

"I have always known. Everything on this coast needs them now. That is the thing about a fort, my friends. Whoever builds the fort, sooner or later everybody has to knock on the fort." Arthur turned back to Spyros on the quay wall.

"Four stones. We will get the permission." Spyros gave a single nod and sat back down beside his canvas. • •"Four to Spyros," Steve said, walking a few steps along the quay with his hands in his pockets.

"We have seven smaller cores and two from the werewolves."

"The smaller cores will do nothing for the vessels we have been using," Arthur said.

"We keep the two werewolves. Those are the only stones worth binding into anything that matters."

"Three to Maria," Sarah said.

"For the gear. She could use them to get more leather."

"And we don't want to come across as bad guests," Arthur agreed.

"You all are family," Petros cut in.

"But more cores will get me more leather."

"So that's the core inventory spoken for," Steve confirmed.

"You see? Re, I told you. Come to me first, I said. He took the oil out of you," Petros said, shaking his head with undisguised delight.

"Four stones. The man has no mercy."

"Four was fair," Arthur said. He looked back toward the road they had walked.

"The Council is the problem now, not the price."